The Greater Good

SIX

I had few expectations about the world awaiting us, and those that I did were swiftly lived down to. From orbit, Fecundia resembled nothing so much as a vast pustule, swollen and livid, choked with the detritus of its industry. Much of the surface was obscured by thick clouds the colour of diarrhoea, which swirled above the hive zones[44], each one of which sprawled for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Around them was nothing but a wilderness of spoil and waste. The place had been an uninhabitable ruin before the Mechanicus moved in, and they’d hardly done much to improve it that I could see[45].

‘Quite a spectacle, is it not?’ El’hassai remarked at my elbow, in studiedly neutral tones, and I started, having been too lost in my own thoughts to have noticed his all but silent approach.

‘If you like that sort of thing,’ I conceded. The night side of the world below was glowing a dull, flickering red, the light of uncountable furnaces making it look as though the whole planet was on fire. I was reminded of the volcanic hellhole I’d so recently escaped from by the skin of my teeth[46], and shuddered. ‘Remind you of anywhere back home?’

‘Our fabricatories are less… profligate with their usage of energy,’ El’hassai said, a little prissily, I thought, but then with xenos it was often hard to tell what they were really thinking.

‘Good for you,’ I responded reflexively, letting him pick the sarcasm out of the remark if he liked.

‘It hardly looks like a tempting target for the tyranids,’ he went on, clearly choosing not to. ‘Our encounters with them would tend to suggest that they prefer their planets more verdant.’

‘There’s about twenty billion people down there,’ I corrected him. ‘Even if half of them are mostly metal. And probably twice that number of servitors[47]. More than enough biomass to make an attack worth their while.’

‘I sit corrected,’ El’hassai said, raising his eyes from the cloacal world beneath us to the cold, clear void surrounding it. A few of the uncountable pinpricks of light bespattering the sable backdrop were moving against the luminescent smudge of the bulk of the galaxy, and he gestured towards them. ‘The picket ships appear to be taking up their positions with commendable alacrity.’

‘They do,’ I agreed, although the fleet’s deployment was nothing to do with me. The Naval contingent had their own commissars assigned to them, who would be sufficiently versed in three-dimensional tactics to understand what was going on. Nevertheless, I strongly suspected that most of the vessels we could see were actually cargo haulers, feeding the insatiable appetites of the furnaces below with raw materials or carrying away the spoils of their labour to half a hundred worlds[48]. Of more immediate concern were the troop ships carrying the Imperial Guard contingent, which should have made orbit by now, and begun ferrying soldiers to the surface ready to begin fortifying the hives. Precisely how we were going to manage that was still proving a major headache, as we had barely enough manpower to protect even one of the population centres below, let alone all of them; but at least there was little prospect of us running out of ammunition.

Before the conversation, or my thoughts, could turn in a more pessimistic direction, a familiar odour heralded the arrival of my aide. ‘Bit of a mess,’ he remarked, glancing out of the viewport.

‘Forge worlds generally are,’ I reminded him, and he nodded, with a sniff of disapproval.

‘Like that last one we went to,’ he agreed. ‘Cak everywhere.’ Then he shrugged. ‘I dare say it’ll be better indoors.’

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ I said, hoping he was right. ‘I take it the shuttle’s ready?’

Jurgen nodded. ‘Lord General’s compliments, sir, and he’d like to see you aboard it at your earliest convenience.’

‘Not his exact words, I’m sure,’ I said.

Jurgen shuffled his feet. ‘That was the gist of it,’ he said doggedly. It would have been unkind to press him for further details, as he was evidently attempting to spare my feelings and, knowing Zyvan as well as I did, I was more than capable of filling in the blanks for myself in any case.

‘Then we’d better not keep him waiting,’ I said, turning to El’hassai, who still seemed mesmerised by the starfield beyond the armourglass. ‘Will you be joining us, ambassador?’ Truth to tell I was in two minds about asking, but protocol demanded that I did, and at least if he tagged along I’d be spared the necessity of regurgitating our discussions with the Mechanicus for his benefit at a later date. Not to mention feeling a lot more comfortable knowing where he was.

‘That would be the most efficient course of action,’ the tau agreed, turning away from the suppurating planet below and falling into step at my elbow as we made our way to the docking bay. The corridors were crowded with Guardsmen and Navy personnel, who stepped aside, with varying expressions of bemusement, hostility or repugnance at the sight of the xenos, but El’hassai ignored them all. For my own part, I barely noticed, commissars hardly being welcome anywhere they went, but Jurgen returned scowl for scowl, clearing a path for us as effectively as Zyvan’s bodyguard of storm troopers would have done.

It seemed we were to travel aboard Zyvan’s personal shuttle, which was fine by me: its deeply padded chairs and carpeting were a great deal more comfortable than the hard seats and metal decking of the more utilitarian transports I was used to taking to and from orbit, and I knew from experience that the drinks cabinet was well stocked.

‘Forget your vox-bead?’ the Lord General greeted me, as we walked up the ramp. Then his eye fell on El’hassai, a couple of paces behind, flanked by the bodyguards who’d joined him as we’d entered the hangar bay. ‘Envoy. Good of you to join us.’ If his demeanour was anything to go by, however, he would have been perfectly happy for the tau to have remained aboard the ship.

Sure enough, as I settled into my chair and accepted the amasec Jurgen poured out for me, Zyvan leaned closer, and lowered his voice. ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ he asked, sotto voce.

‘We’re meant to be in an alliance,’ I reminded him, equally quietly. There was little chance of being overheard above the rising note of the engines, but you never knew with xenos[49], so I kept my voice low nevertheless. ‘The cogboys know we’ve got a delegation aboard, so why not let him sit in on the initial meeting?’

‘If you think they’ll wear it,’ Zyvan said, shrugging.

‘Why wouldn’t they?’ I asked, in honest bemusement.

Zyvan shrugged again, and took an appreciative sip of his amasec. ‘Why do the cogboys do anything?’ he asked, reasonably enough.

Our descent was as smooth and untroubled as we could have hoped for, the buffeting as we entered the atmosphere mild enough even for Jurgen’s sensitive stomach; but then Zyvan’s personal pilot would have been one of the finest in the fleet, so that was hardly surprising. The view of the world through the viewports hardly improved as we approached it, the thick clouds of corrosive smog I’d seen from orbit blanketing the ground until we’d almost reached the surface for which I could only be grateful, judging by the brief glimpses of what awaited us that I was able to catch through the occasional gap.

At length, bright, flashing luminators stabbed through the murk, guiding us towards the landing zone, and I began to discern the vast bulk of the primary manufacturing complex below and around our hurrying shuttle, looming out of the smog like a volcanic mountain range. The light of the beacons was joined by innumerable others, speckling the oppressive mass of artificial cliff faces surrounding us, or carried aboard the shoal of other air traffic among which we moved, like minnows skirting the ramparts of a reef. A not unapt comparison, I suppose, as, like a reef, the hive had accreted gradually, by the actions of uncountable individuals, over thousands of years. Eventually, it would wither and die, the resources it had been put here to plunder exhausted, and the Mechanicus would uproot themselves and begin again on some other lump of rock unfortunate enough to possess something they wanted[50].

‘Aren’t we heading for the main shuttle pads?’ I asked, as, with a surge of acceleration which left Jurgen looking distinctly green around the gills even by his standards, our pilot lifted us out of the main traffic, to soar majestically over the rising peaks of the hive range.

‘The magi running this place want to keep our meeting discreet,’ Zyvan said, and I nodded, approving. Trying to work out an effective strategy was going to be hard enough as it was, without getting bogged down in official receptions and all that sort of thing. Especially as tech-priests weren’t exactly renowned for throwing a good party.

‘Where, then?’ I asked, and Zyvan gestured towards a spire, topped with a cogwheel icon big enough to have parked a Baneblade on each of the spurs[51].

‘The Spire of Blessed Computation,’ he said, squinting at the data-slate in his hand. It was a plain, military field model, incongruously drab against the garish dress uniform he’d put on for the occasion, but he was, as ever, more concerned with the practicalities. I’d often thought that he’d prefer to do without any of the ornamentation and ceremony which surrounded him if he could, but he was just as trammelled by the protocols of his position as I was by mine. I must have looked puzzled, because he added, ‘it’s where most of this miserable rock’s run from.’

‘Good choice, then,’ I said. The closer we were to the cogboys’ command centre, the easier it would be to liaise with them.

‘I’m glad you approve,’ Zyvan said, not entirely joking.

The spire was so close by now that it was blotting out much of the hive, its upper storeys becoming clearer as we glided towards it through the ocean of murk. The sun was barely visible, discernable only as a luminescent disc, dim enough to look at directly, glimmering wanly through the clotted brown clouds walling us off from the rest of the universe so that we were almost entirely reliant on the luminators to see where we were going. I thumbed my palm[52], and hoped the pilot had a reliable auspex. From this distance the sides which had seemed so smooth from a couple of kilometres away looked gnarled, like the bark of an impossibly tall tree, encrusted with thousands of protruding substructures, vents, antennae, and work platforms. Servitors and spirejacks, armoured against the hellish conditions of the open air, swarmed around it, doing Emperor knew what.

‘That must be it,’ Jurgen said, with a sigh of relief which gave me the full benefit of his halitosis, and prompted a brief, envious glance at the full face helmets sported by El’hassai’s fire warrior escort. I followed the direction of his gaze, and found we were descending towards a small landing platform, jutting from the vertical face of the spire, one of many such lost among the myriad of excrescences.

‘Looks that way,’ I agreed, narrowing my eyes to peer through the curdled air. Landing lights were flashing, guiding our pilot in, and striking flickering highlights from the augmetic enhancements of the honour guard of scarlet-uniformed skitarii lining up beside the doorway leading inside the tower. A thought struck me, and I glanced at Zyvan in some consternation. ‘They surely don’t expect us to step outside, do they?’

‘It won’t be for long,’ he assured me. ‘Magos Dysen says short-term exposure to the atmosphere is quite harmless.’

‘Quite,’ I said, inflecting it like assent, while ruminating on just how much imprecision the simple little word might be reflecting. ‘It’s all right for him, he doesn’t have lungs to frak up in any case[53].’

‘Not biological ones, at any rate,’ Zyvan said. But before we could debate the matter further, a faint tremor in the hull plating told us that the pilot had landed with just as much skill as I would have expected, and the time for conversation was past.